Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Kieran Harty, Tintri CEO
In 2013, Software-Defined Storage Will Complete the Software-Defined Data Center
There's been a lot of talk in recent months about the
software-defined data center, or, put another way, the opportunity for IT to
move away from infrastructure defined by proprietary hardware and towards a
dynamic data center built on standardized hardware that supports a flexible
software layer. When people talk about the "software-defined data center,"
they're essentially referring to three major components: servers, networking
and storage.
Servers are the most evolved component of the
software-defined data center to date. Server virtualization has evolved from emerging
technology to an IT best practice. Outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz underscored
this fact at VMworld 2012, when he stated that over 60% of enterprise
applications are virtualized today, compared to just 25% in 2008.
After servers come networks. Software-defined networking has
been an extremely busy space in 2012. High-profile acquisitions from the likes
of VMware (Nicira) and Brocade (Vyatta) - as well as the launches of a number
of new software-defined networking companies - have validated software-defined
networking, and the significant role they will play in data centers going
forward.
That brings us to storage, which has traditionally been the
laggard of the data center. In fact, the largest players in the storage market
are still using legacy architectures that were built over two decades ago, and
tailored to a physical (non-virtualized) infrastructure. Virtualized
infrastructures pose new challenges for legacy storage systems; for one, they
often cause bottlenecks that hinder overall performance and make for complicated
troubleshooting. These performance issues in turn create a need to
overprovision storage systems - which comes at a prohibitive cost.
As a result of this phenomenon, storage has long been cited
as the single biggest hurdle for organizations trying to broaden their virtual
deployment. This has provided a great opportunity for next-generation storage
solutions. A number of new solutions have entered the market over the past
several years, using new technologies like flash memory and offering new file
systems that are purpose-built for today's IT realities. There has been more
innovation in the storage field over the past year alone than has been seen in
nearly two decades-when companies like EMC and NetApp rose in prominence by
building networked storage products that were tailored to that era's IT challenges.
As storage technology continues to progress on a
software-defined path, one particular concept will become increasingly
important: VM-aware storage. VM-aware storage refers to storage that is built
from the ground up for virtualized infrastructure. Rather than operating on
traditional storage objects like LUNS and volumes, functionality is provided
for software-defined objects like virtual machines and virtual disks. VM-aware
storage is typically built using flash and powerful multi-core processors. This
storage needs to retain the reliability and availability of traditional
enterprise storage while also delivering on the promise of virtualization
VMware itself has acknowledged the problems with traditional
storage by introducing the idea of a ‘virtual volumes' or vVols API. In the future, this API will allow some
VM-aware functionality to be added to traditional storage systems.
Expect to see a lot more talk about software-defined (or,
VM-aware) storage in 2013. It's clear that the software-defined data center is
well on its way to becoming a reality-and that storage is following the path of
servers and networks.
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About the Author
Kieran Harty is co-founder and CEO of Tintri (www.tintri.com), a
Mountain View, CA-based startup that builds VM-aware storage systems. Prior to
Tintri, Kieran was Executive Vice President of R&D at VMware for seven
years, where he was responsible for all products. He led the delivery of the
first and subsequent releases of ESX Server, Virtual Center and VMware's desktop
products. Before VMware, he was Vice President of R&D at Visigenic/Borland
and Chief Scientist at TIBCO. Kieran has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from
Stanford University and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Trinity
College Dublin.